The Faith of Men eBook

Lawrence Pentfield and Corry Hutchinson were millionaires,
though they did not look it. There seemed nothing
unusual about them, while they would have passed muster
as fair specimens of lumbermen in any Michigan camp.
But outside, in the darkness, where holes yawned in
the ground, were many men engaged in windlassing muck
and gravel and gold from the bottoms of the holes
where other men received fifteen dollars per day for
scraping it from off the bedrock. Each day thousands
of dollars’ worth of gold were scraped from
bedrock and windlassed to the surface, and it all
belonged to Pentfield and Hutchinson, who took their
rank among the richest kings of Bonanza.

Pentfield broke the silence that followed on Billebedam’s
departure by heaping the dirty plates higher on the
table and drumming a tattoo on the cleared space with
his knuckles. Hutchinson snuffed the smoky candle
and reflectively rubbed the soot from the wick between
thumb and forefinger.

“By Jove, I wish we could both go out!”
he abruptly exclaimed. “That would settle
it all.”

Pentfield looked at him darkly.

“If it weren’t for your cursed obstinacy,
it’d be settled anyway. All you have to
do is get up and go. I’ll look after things,
and next year I can go out.”

“Why should I go? I’ve no one waiting
for me—­”

“Your people,” Pentfield broke in roughly.

“Like you have,” Hutchinson went on.
“A girl, I mean, and you know it.”

Pentfield shrugged his shoulders gloomily. “She
can wait, I guess.”

“But she’s been waiting two years now.”

“And another won’t age her beyond recognition.”

“That’d be three years. Think of
it, old man, three years in this end of the earth,
this falling-off place for the damned!” Hutchinson
threw up his arm in an almost articulate groan.

He was several years younger than his partner, not
more than twenty-six, and there was a certain wistfulness
in his face that comes into the faces of men when
they yearn vainly for the things they have been long
denied. This same wistfulness was in Pentfield’s
face, and the groan of it was articulate in the heave
of his shoulders.

“I dreamed last night I was in Zinkand’s,”
he said. “The music playing, glasses clinking,
voices humming, women laughing, and I was ordering
eggs—­yes, sir, eggs, fried and boiled and
poached and scrambled, and in all sorts of ways, and
downing them as fast as they arrived.”

“I’d have ordered salads and green things,”
Hutchinson criticized hungrily, “with a big,
rare, Porterhouse, and young onions and radishes,—­the
kind your teeth sink into with a crunch.”

“I’d have followed the eggs with them,
I guess, if I hadn’t awakened,” Pentfield
replied.

He picked up a trail-scarred banjo from the floor
and began to strum a few wandering notes. Hutchinson
winced and breathed heavily.

“Quit it!” he burst out with sudden fury,
as the other struck into a gaily lifting swing.
“It drives me mad. I can’t stand
it”